Selling the product instead of teaching the test

I’ve been wanted to write a post about why individualized tutoring matters, why simply taking a class or picking a book off the store shelf can lead students away from the learning they need in order to improve their score.

There’s nothing like studying with the right materials to scaffold your learning; conversely, there is nothing like studying with wrong materials to leave you without the payoff you expect. Here is some hard-earned insight into which materials to use -- and which to avoid.

Part of standardized test preparation is not only knowing the content of the exam, but also being able to self-assess why you're getting a question incorrect. In this blog post, one of our most experienced standardized test preparation tutors reviews how he buckets content knowledge when teaching standardized tests, and how it will help you improve your results in the future!

Everyone has to give presentations at some point. Whether pitching a new product, presenting at a lab meeting, or giving a talk at a conference, the ability to give an effective, engaging, and persuasive talk cannot be understated. Unfortunately, these skills are rarely taught formally in school. I’ll present ten simple rules that will help reduce your anxiety and make your presentations as effective as possible.

There are many different ways to learn information, but among my colleagues in medical school, flashcards are one of the most common ways to study. While making flashcards may seem simple straight forward, I have learned over time that the exact opposite is the case.

If you’ve spent a school year (or ten) in the Boston area, you know that New England winters aren’t always fun. On a 10 degree day in February, it takes a lot of motivation for me to venture outside. After several years of school, I know that I study more efficiently when I’m not at my house; when I’m home, it’s too easy to succumb to the temptations of chatting with my roommates, rummaging through the kitchen, or taking a nice nap. The problem is that as it gets colder, going somewhere else to study becomes much harder. Here are some places in the Boston/Cambridge area that make it worth the trek – in any weather!

Students in grades 4-10 tend to face very different challenges when preparing for their tests. The youngest students are unfamiliar with such a prescribed set of learning goals, so distinct from the kind of open-ended and holistic kind of learning common across public and private elementary schools. For these students, they may never have experienced academic learning as a process of wresting with challenging, new content, particularly so much at once and in such a specialized context.

Most of us know what it feels like to put significant effort into an assignment, and to have it returned with a barrage of red comments cascading down the pages, recommending innumerable changes for improvement. It can feel disheartening and frustrating – and sometimes dampens your motivation to want to try at all to work on a revision!

There are many opportunities to make mistakes on the GRE, and our Master tutor Greg has witnessed all of them. With over 500 hours of experience teaching with Cambridge Coaching, he is one of the most well-qualified GRE tutors out there. What are the most common problems he addresses? Some of the answers may surprise you. Greg shares his candid feedback below!

What is Total Justification?

Most students pick the correct answer on a multiple choice practice problem, and think they have gotten the most they can out of the problem; they are wrong. Answering a question on the MCAT is essentially the task of appraising answer choices to see if they fit certain criteria, such as being factually correct or logical in the context of the passage. Appraising answer choices in the context of certain criteria is the meat of the MCAT, and practicing it just once per question is a massive waste. For this reason, I recommend that students explicitly justify why every correct answer is correct, but also, why every incorrect answer is incorrect: Total Justification.